Ignorance behind failure to see need for Voter I.D.

In the Dallas Morning News, Wayne Slater the Republican-hater, demonstrates a problem with the public debate over Voter ID. “As we reported today, Abbott has championed photo ID as a way to stop voter fraud in Texas. But a review of the cases he has actually prosecuted since 2004 found just four cases in which somebody tried to cast a ballot where voter ID would have prevented it,” Slater wrote.

“As attorney general, Abbott’s office has pursued 66 people on charges of voting irregularities. Half the cases involved mail-in ballots. A few others involved felons who aren’t allowed to vote or election officials engaged in illegal behavior. But none of those would have been stopped by the photo ID requirement,” Slater says.

He points out that Democrats claim “there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud…”

There’s no question that ballots-by-mail are a center of vote fraud but, that doesn’t mean that there is an absence of in-person vote fraud. We catch more ballot-by-mail fraud because in recognition of the chance for easy cheating, the system is setup to all more scrutiny.

The problem with in-person vote fraud is that there is almost no way to detect it under the current system. Changing the system to require voters to present a trusted form of identification will put in place a manner whereby fraud can be detected. Currently, the sheer number of registered voters on the rolls versus the number who actually vote makes it easy to impersonate other voters and very unlikely that anyone would notice. And if they did? It would only be noticed by the legitimate voter only after the fraud had occurred and the impersonator had long left the polling place. There is no way for officials to know who the person was who committed the fraud and thus you get no meaningful investigation and prosecution.

The Supreme Court, in the Indiana voter ID case was correct in reasoning that because organized ballot-by-bail cheating happens, it is likely that in-person, voter impersonation happens too. Voter I.D. will allow us a tool to detect such and, because of how it works, prevent illegitimate votes from being cast in most cases.